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This article contains full spoilers for the finale of Star Trek: Lower Decks.
To explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before.
These words have always captured the central mission of not just the USS Enterprise, but also Star Trek itself. Every one of its TV series, movies, books, comics, and video games have been focused on the idea of exploration and discovery. As a product of the 1960s, it made sense that The Original Series would see space as the final frontier. But as we’ve seen over the past decade, another frontier has captured the world’s imagination: the multiverse, with its endless alternate realities.
Surprising as it might seem coming from an animated comedy, Star Trek: Lower Decks ends its five-season run by pointing Starfleet toward the multiverse, giving the franchise a new and modern direction.
Alternate Histories
“Now that the rift is a permanently open portal to other quantum realities, Starfleet considers it a gate to a whole new frontier,” explains Brad Boimler’s (Jack Quaid) log in the last act of the finale “The New Next Generation,” directed by Megan Lloyd and written by showrunner Mike McMahan. But like most things Boimler does, there’s a bit of overstatement in his observation. Quantum realities aren’t a whole new frontier, because Star Trek‘s been going to alternate worlds since the 1960s.
Most famously, the season two Original Series episode “Mirror, Mirror” sent Kirk to the Mirror Universe, where everyone was evil, as designated by goatees and exposed midriffs. The Mirror Universe has been an ongoing concern in Trek, ignored by The Next Generation, but a major pat of Deep Space Nine and the setting of two of the best Enterprise episodes.
The 2009 Star Trek movie directed by J. J. Abrams also take place in an alternate reality, dubbed the Kelvin Timeline, which branched from the main universe when the Romulan Nero destroyed the USS Kelvin in his own vengeful search for Spock. Thus, everything done by Chris Pine‘s Kirk happens independently of adventures done by the Kirk played by William Shatner and Paul Wesley.
Those are just explicit, in-cannon examples. Like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which takes a lot of cues from Star Trek, the franchise sometimes conflates reality and time. The Temporal Cold War that drove many episodes of Enterprise and was echoed in Discovery warned about major changes to reality, that could be understood as the creation of alternate worlds. In fact, a recent Strange New Worlds episode confirmed that fact, when Kirk and La’an meet Khan Noonien Singh as a small child in the mid-2000s, his traditional backstory shifting because of fallout from the Temporal Cold War.
All of that’s a long way of saying, that multiverses aren’t new to Star Trek, even if the franchise hasn’t focused on them as much as “The New Next Generation” suggests. But is that a good thing?
Once More, With Feeling
It’s hard not to think that Captain William Boimler, Brad Boimler’s clone/twin/duplicate, speaks for most pop culture obsessives when he grouches about the multiverse. “I’m so sick of the f___ing multiverse,” he shouts in the penultimate episode, “Fissure Quest.” According to him, the multiverse is just filled with stuff we know, albeit with surface level differences.
He’s not wrong. As we’ve seen before, the major alternate realities in Star Trek are “Sulu has a scar and is mean” or “lots of lens flare on the bridge.” The multiverses in other big pop culture franchises don’t fare much better. The Flash and Deadpool & Wolverine feel less like character-driven narratives and more of an excuse to pull actors back into the only paying roles available to them, squeezing into spandex that shouldn’t fit any more. Spider-Man: No Way Home made a ton of money, but the cameos by Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire only diminished Tom Holland’s take.
For every Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, a heartfelt character study surrounded by tons of in-jokes and alternates, there’s a story that just rewards the audience for getting the reference.
If there’s any show guilty of too many references, it’s Lower Decks. Throughout its five seasons, the series has gotten a lot of mileage out of call backs. Sometimes, it’s an obscure out-of-universe sight gag, such as the Spock helmet that Boimler finds, and sometimes its Mariner (Tawny Newsome) off-handedly mentioning Geordi and Ro phasing through existence in TNG. The show is a treasure trove for nerds who like to understand references.
But as Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, and Rutherford grew into their own characters, Lower Decks became less about the references and more about them as engaging people. Even better, the series applied that logic to legacy characters. Season four built to a conflict with Nick Locarno, exactly the type of character that Lower Decks likes to reference. For the uninitiated, Nick Locarno was played by Robert Duncan McNeil in the TNG episode “The First Duty.” McNeil returned to the franchise in Star Trek: Voyager, this time as Lt. Tom Paris. Now, actors have played multiple characters in Trek before (just ask Jeffery Combs!), but the Paris/Locarno connection stands out because they were supposed to be the same character, and only changed for contract and royalty reasons.
Although Lower Decks did make some jokes about the similarities between Locarno and Paris, and the behind-the-scenes shenanigans that brought about the change, the episodes are more about an actual person who feels overlooked.
The same could be said of most of the legacy characters that Lower Decks has brought back. Sonya Gomez matured beyond the fumbler we saw in TNG to become a respected Captain, proving the series’ theme that mistakes are part of the learning process. A check in on Ferenginar found Rom and Leeta still leading their world in the right direction after DS9 (sorry everyone, I did misread the episode in my original write-up on that episode).
Most notably, “Fissure Quest” showed Lily Sloane from Generations playing an important behind the scenes role in Starfleet, after apparently being ignored by history books, Garak and Bashir in a loving relationship, and maybe gave a good reason why Harry Kim shouldn’t be promoted.
Time and again, Lower Decks has shown that multiverses don’t need to be an empty gimmick. They can be a genuine tool to build character and explore complex themes.
The Continuing Mission
The last episode of Lower Decks is titled “The New Next Generation,” and it’s hard to think of something more appropriate for the show. Not only does Lower Decks take its name from a season seven episode of TNG, but its theme and font choices all recall that classic.
However, the title also points toward a possibility for the future of Star Trek. We’ve complained a lot about how modern Trek keeps going in two not-great directions, either going back to the past for more prequels or to gritty, unnecessarily grim reimaginings like the first two seasons of Picard. If Trek wants to speak to the current generation in a way that TOS and TNG did for audiences of the ’60s and the ’90s, multiverse might be the way to go.
Lower Decks proved that references and callbacks can have meaning, as long as they put theme and character first. A few Boimler freak outs might help too.
All five seasons of Star Trek: Lower Decks are streaming on Paramount+.
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